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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended his country's nuclear program as he began a four-nation tour of Latin America, joining his ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in accusing the U.S. and its allies of using the dispute to unjustly threaten Iran.[snip] Both leaders planned to travel to Nicaragua on Tuesday for the inauguration of newly re-elected President Daniel Ortega, and then Ahmadinejad will also visit Cuba and Ecuador.

MANAGUA (Reuters) - Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader, looks likely to win re-election on Sunday after heavy social spending won him strong support among the country's poor. Ortega has overseen a period of economic progress in his five years in power, backed by financial aid from his socialist ally in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez.

Media blackout: CIA director accused of links to Communist spy contact -- scandal ignored Wes Vernon June 13, 2011 If you have been depending on the mainstream media for your news the past few days, you are probably learning here for the first time that CIA Director Leon Panetta has been called out for his links to an important open member of the Communist Party. Some background When this writer first arrived in Washington, D.C., as a reporter in 1968, one of my assignments was to cover the congressional delegation from Washington State. Occasionally, both Democrat and Republican members of...

Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi is well known now for the abuses he has inflicted on his own people during more than four decades of brutal rule in Libya, but few remember the vast campaign of carnage and terrorism he orchestrated across West Africa and Europe when he was at the height of his powers. Nor are his more recent alliance with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and his long-standing relationship with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua -- both of whom are busy trampling their constitutions and moving toward dictatorship -- well understood. And the fact that all three governments support the Revolutionary Armed...

21st Century SocialismThe attempt to destroy democracy in Latin America.  The Obama administration started out on the wrong foot in world affairs. It used techniques better suited for domestic political campaigns — popularity contests — in its foreign policy. In our own hemisphere, the result was confusion for our allies and our enemies alike. The overriding objective of U.S. policy — in Latin America and elsewhere — should be to advance U.S. national interests, not to curry favor with foreign leaders. If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so much the better. But when we try to befriend...

Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WedxY61d60

Concern is mounting that the US government is using antiterror laws - namely, the Patriot Act - to revive a now-discredited practice common during the cold war: the prevention of foreign intellectuals who are critical of administration policies from entering the country and sharing their views with Americans. The practice, called ideological exclusion, became illegal in 1990. But a recent lawsuit - brought by the American Association of University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the PEN American Center under the Freedom of Information Act - is asking the Bush administration to explain its decisions to revoke or deny...

With U.S. policymakers distracted by the situation in Honduras, Nicaragua continues to move toward authoritarianism. On October 19, a Nicaraguan Supreme Court panel overturned a constitutional provision limiting presidents to two non-consecutive terms in office. The ruling will allow incumbent Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega--the Sandinista party leader, former Soviet client, vociferous critic of the United States, and current Hugo Chávez acolyte--to run for another term in 2011. If there were any doubts that Nicaraguan democracy is slowly being extinguished, this latest development should remove them. The Nicaraguan Supreme Court is composed of 16 members. Thanks to a political deal made...

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega (R) and his wife Rosario Murillo gesture during a meeting in Managua October 20, 2009. REUTERS/Cesar Perez/Nicaragua Presidency/Handout WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States on Thursday expressed concern about a Nicaraguan court ruling that opens the way for leftist President Daniel Ortega to seek re-election in the 2011 election. Nicaragua's Supreme Court on Monday issued a ruling that helped to clear the way for Ortega to run for another term, following a petition from him and a group of mayors last week. The country's electoral court said it would comply with the ruling. The U.S. State...

Edén Pastora threatened to attack Honduras According to the former military, the Honduran conflict could only be resolved by guns. 18.07.09 - Updated: 18.07.09 06:56 pm - Writing: redaccion@elheraldo.hn Tegucigalpa, Honduras . Former Nicaraguan guerrilla Eden Pastora, threatened to take up arms if there is no agreement in Costa Rica on the return of Manuel Zelaya as president. Pastora, a former Sandinista commander, is known for having led the command that took the National Palace, in the late 70s, during the Somoza dictatorship. See the biography of Eden Pastora According to El Universal of Venezuela, "Commander Zero," he told the...

My research concluded that, along with the environmental groups that peddle fear and flawed science, the most popular recipient of massive foundation money is the vocal open borders and "multicultural" lobby that, among other things, backs amnesty for 15 million-plus illegal aliens and so-called foreign "guest worker programs. This lobby consists of numerous foundation-supported advocacy groups seeking to change the demographic composition and culture of the United States. One of the most militant is the National Immigration Forum, which received over $3.3 million in grants in 2004 alone from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,...

Suddenly, size matters. That’s the central conclusion of a lengthy Washington Post article Monday that sought to assess the national security implications of Iran’s 2007 move into leftist Sandinista President Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. The newspaper’s badly belated first weigh-in on the Islamic Republic’s most northern presence in the Americas wound up fixating on a curious detail: the physical size of the Iranian embassy there. Was it a huge mega-embassy, as some U.S. officials have said? A smallish embassy? Something mid-range but perhaps aspiring to be architecturally grandiose? The Post’s writers, offering no basis for such a wacky thesis, seem to...

NEW YORK — The head of the United Nations General Assembly signalled Friday a breakthrough is imminent in talks to resolve the political crisis in Honduras. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann spoke in New York as thousands of supporters of Honduras’s ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, held rallies in the Central American country. “I have a feeling that we are moving in that direction rather quickly,” the former Nicaraguan revolutionary, who is also a Catholic priest, told a news conference at the UN. Insiders suggested that a timetable had been laid out in which Zelaya, a rich landowner whose leftist policies led him...

Politics: Is anyone surprised that the would-be czarina of federal climate and energy policy has ties to a socialist group? The environmental movement's goal is to afflict the economy, not comfort the ecology.Carol Browner, who'll run the new White House office of climate and energy policies, isn't new to Washington. The public will recognize her name from the years she served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton. The public, however, knows little or nothing about her work with Socialist International, a group that describes itself as a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labor parties that envisions...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), then based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, vigorously lobbied for Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, the Cuban-style Marxist regime that shot its way to power in 1979. Today, WOLA pretends it is concerned about the rule of law in Honduras after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court supported removing the leftist president for defying its constitution. WOLA and Jim Wallis' publication Sojourners have teamed up to spin Honduras' defense of its democracy as another example of a U.S.-supported, imperialist military coup. The constitutional coup in Honduras was...

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago -- President Obama endured a 50-minute diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that lashed out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America and included a rambling denunciation of the U.S.-imposed isolation of Cuba's Communist government. Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes. The speech was part of the opening ceremonies at the fifth Summit of the Americas here. Later, at a photo opportunity with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Obama held his tongue when asked what he thought about Ortega's speech. "It was 50...

(Abridged English-language translation) While President Daniel Ortega asked last night "to eradicate violence as a method of struggle", hundreds of Sandinista followers who attended the swearing-in of municipal officials held at Plaza de la República became violent towards the liberals who were protesting against election fraud. Ten minutes had barely passed after Ortega asked to eliminate violence in Nicaragua when a large Sandinista mob attacked mayors and [municipal] councilmen with the [opposition] Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC) who came to be sworn in by the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE). Once Ortega's speech ended, the Sandinistas attempted to lynch PLC Managua councilman...

Does America need a terrorist financier to secure its “freedom”? Sami al-Arian thinks so. His National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom poses as a watchdog for the Constitution, but he has focused his lobbying efforts on repealing anti-terrorist legislation. While Sami al-Arian himself has been arrested for being a prime financier for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (and likely one of its three founders), his political movement continues to threaten homeland security. Al-Arian founded the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) in 1997 as a reaction to the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996. The coalition’s stated goal “is to help change the...

WASHINGTON -- Millions of American boys have dreamed of hitting a grand slam or pitching a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium because baseball's greatest have performed there. Talented musicians and singers aspire to New York's famed Carnegie Hall, for they know it represents the pinnacle of their profession. For gifted physicians and medical researchers, the Mount Everest of medicine is the Mayo Clinic. But certain institutions can bring out the worst in people. For the professional peddlers of anti-Americanism, haters of free enterprise, and true believers in global government, there is only one place that it really pays to perform: the...

Russia offered aid to the leftist government of Nicaragua on Wednesday, a former Cold War ally, as part of a push to increase its influence in Latin America after years on the sidelines in the region. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin was in the Central American country following a tour of Cuba, where he promised to help areas devastated by recent hurricanes. Sechin said his country wants to promote trade, energy and education projects while increasing "political cooperation" with Nicaragua. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla, had close ties to Moscow when he first governed the country...

Question of the Day: John McCain Supposedly Roughed Up . . . By Debbie Schlussel . . . an associate of Communist Sandinista Dictator Daniel "Gucci Glasses" Ortega of Nicaragua, and this is a "bad thing" because . . .? Sorry, but if true--and he's now denying it--this enhances my respect for John McCain a gazillion-fold and makes me happier to vote for him in November. It probably is true because the John McCain of 1987 was a true conservative, a lot different than the one of today. A brief refresher: Daniel Ortega was (and remains) a Communist thug. He...

So John McCain roughed up a Sandinista back in the 80's. Senator Thad Cochran (a political enemy) says it's true, McCain denies it. Here's an excerpt from My Way News describing the incident in Managua: "McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said in an interview with The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down...

Asked about Thad Cochran's claim, McCain said at a press conference today in Colombia that it's "simply not true." "I had many, many meetings with the Sandinistas," McCain said. "I must say, I did not admire the Sandinistas much. But there was never anything of that nature. It just didn't happen." A former foreign policy adviser to McCain who was on the 1987 trip corroborates to the AP his former boss's recounting.

GULFPORT -- Notably mild-mannered Republican Sen. Thad Cochran shocked many earlier this year with comments about John McCain's volatile temper. He has since mended fences with the GOP presidential nominee. But as first reported at sunherald.com, Cochran told the Sun Herald he witnessed a confrontation between McCain and a Sandinista rebel decades ago in which McCain "got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him." --------------------------------------- "McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I...

Translator - AltaVista/Babelfish: SANGTIAGO DE CHILE. - The United States had to pay 50,000 million dollars to Nicaragua by their support in the decade of 1980 to the "cons", maintained Central American president Daniel Ortega during XVII the Latin American Summit. "the United States must pay to Nicaragua a compensation of 50,000 million dollars by the sanction that applied in 1986 the Court the International to him of Is It", it affirmed Ortega Saturday in an extensive speech in which it reviewed to American interventions in the world. Ortega indicated that There is condemned It to the United States by...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush congratulated by telephone once bitter U.S. foe Daniel Ortega on his election as Nicaraguan president, the White House said on Monday. ~ snip ~

Daniel Ortega elected, according to a radio Sandinista MANAGUA - the ex-guerillero Daniel Ortega would be elected with the first turn of the presidential election, according to the radio "primerissima", a radio operator pro-Sandinista who quotes a nonofficial fast calculation. The Face Sandinista of release Nationale (FSLN) would obtain 40,22% of the votes, in front of national Alliance nicaragueyenne (ALN) of Eduardo Montealegre with 30,3O%, the Party Liberal Constitutionaliste (PLC) of Jose Rizo 22%, the movement of restoration Sandinista (MRS) of Edmundo Jarquin 6,67% and Alliance for the change (AC) of Eden Pastora 0,4%. Close of the district géneral...

Daniel Ortega ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990. He may do so again very soon. The leader of the Nicaraguan political party FSLN, better known as the Sandinistas, is no stranger to the spotlight – he went toe to toe for years with President Ronald Reagan or standing for president – he has done so in every election since being defeated in 1990 by Violeta Chamorro. Mostly he has been relegated to a distant second or worse. This year, however, the Nicaraguan historical dustbin seemingly has an escape hatch. But why is 2006 so different? The answer comes in three...

Ortega's Return? By Frank J Gaffney Jr. FrontPageMagazine.com | November 1, 2006 This Sunday, the people of Nicaragua will cast votes that may elect their next president in the first round of balloting. Depending on their choice, that exercise in democracy may be the last for some time to come – if the winning candidate reverts to form and ushers in a new era of authoritarianism in a country too long afflicted by his misrule. According to the polls, all other things being equal, Daniel Ortega – the communist revolutionary whose repressive regime ruled in Managua in the 1980s –...

OLIVER NORTH AND HIS associates were leaving Managua last Tuesday on a private plane after a dramatic surprise visit when they heard news they could scarcely comprehend. The U.S. State Department had just issued a "Public Announcement" that, in effect, warned Americans not to travel to Nicaragua because of the prospect for "violent demonstrations" and "sporadic acts of violence" leading up to the Nov. 5 presidential election there. The North group had seen nothing in Nicaragua to justify a travel advisory, normally issued when life and limb of visiting Americans are at risk. U.S. and Nicaraguan security officials alike are...

Daniel Ortega, the former leader of the Left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua and one of the United States' most reviled Cold War enemies, appears to be on the brink of making a spectacular comeback.Twenty years after his Sandinista government fought a bitter civil war against American-funded ''Contra" rebels, he is leading in the polls for the presidential elections on Sunday. But now he has ''found God" and talks of ''peace and love" not Marxist-Leninist ideals. In a final frenzy of campaigning, the podgy, balding 60-year-old, is spreading what he calls a "spiritual revolution", "full of love and hope" around this country,...

Alliances and enmities have been reshaped in a magically realist way for the presidential electionLIKE most places in the ramshackle Nicaraguan capital, the street corner has no name. You are merely told to go to the baseball field in the “America Uno” slum and find your way from there. It is not hard to locate because hundreds of people from the surrounding shanties, many wearing football shirts emblazoned with the name Daniel, have been waiting into the night to cheer the man they hope will deliver them from poverty. Fireworks crackle overhead and speakers blare out his campaign song —...

The sight of a moustachioed former Marxist revolutionary and American Cold War foe hugging babies and autographing baseball caps as he embraces democracy should bring a frisson of pleasure to the US.But instead, the fact that the election campaign of the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega is going so well that he may return to power in Nicaragua next month is causing alarm in Washington. For although Mr Ortega's old Soviet mentors have gone, his country is once again the focus of a crucial regional power play in Washington's Latin American back yard. Some 27 years after his Sandinista movement overthrew...

Breaking with a long tradition, Jimmy Carter runs around the world bad-mouthing President Bush and the USA. He seems to think that those of us who were alive and conscious during his failed presidency have forgotten. I haven’t. I remember 15 to 20% interest rates at the same time that unemployment stood at 7%. I remember inflation at 12%.

Just three weeks after Hezbollah invaded Israel, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and causing the deaths of eight others, Human Rights Watch issued a 49-page report about the war that had been ignited by this attack. The title of the report was Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon. "Our research shows that Israel's claim that Hezbollah fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare," declared Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based nongovernmental organization. "In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes," the group concluded. Then it added the most damning...

WASHINGTON - Elliott Abrams, a special assistant to the president and an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, has been appointed deputy national security adviser with a focus on promoting global democracy and human rights. President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, also announced Wednesday that Faryar Shirzad will continue to serve in an expanded role as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. Abrams, who becomes national security adviser for global democracy strategy, will continue work on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in concert with Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Abrams has served as special assistant...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (Reuters) - Despite U.S. efforts to stop left-wing Nicaraguan politician Daniel Ortega from returning to power, a poll released on Tuesday showed he maintained a six-point lead over rival presidential candidates. Ortega, who headed the socialist Sandinista government in the 1980s, had the support of 29 percent of those surveyed, according to a poll by Cid-Gallup. Twenty-three percent said they backed conservative banker and former Foreign Minister Eduardo Montealegre. A June Cid-Gallip poll also gave Ortega a six-point lead. Washington, which backed Contra rebels who battled the Soviet-supported Sandinista government, has criticized Ortega as "undemocratic" and tried to...

Nicaragua candidate dies suddenly A candidate in Nicaragua's forthcoming presidential elections, Herty Lewites, has died suddenly of a heart attack. Mr Lewites, 65, a centre-left ex-mayor of Managua, had broken with ex-president Daniel Ortega's Sandinista Party and was third in a recent poll. His candidacy had been expected to split the Sandinista vote and harm Mr Ortega's chances of regaining power. A recent poll gave Mr Ortega a narrow lead over his main conservative rival ahead of the November vote. Breakaway movement Mr Lewite's party president Dora Maria Telle told the Associated Press news agency he had suffered from long-standing...

Advocates of an open border between the U.S. and Mexico do their best to present a mellow American flag-waving image to the public. But when they gather in semiprivate, they communicate much differently to each other. Perhaps they need to be even more careful. In the big pro-immigration marches this spring, Hispanic activists sought to present themselves as "civil rights" advocates in the gentle and inclusive tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Oh sure, some of the recent marchers went "off message," carrying Mexican flags and calling for "reconquista," but for the most part, the demonstrators were well-behaved. But...

Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon.  In 1982, following Operation Peace for Galilee, JINSA reported on the international terrorist haven that had arisen in Fatahland – the southern part of Lebanon controlled by Yasser Arafat.  Aside from the expected mélange of Middle Easterners, there were Japanese Red Army, German and Italian Red Brigades, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Salvadorans, Colombians and Peruvians.  There were Iranian Shi’ites, East Germans and Bulgarians.  Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon, again.  Religious Iran and secular, Ba’athist Syria made a deal to use Syrian-controlled Lebanon as a base for Hizballah to attack Israel.  Today, Israel...

LEON, Nicaragua (Reuters) - After years of setbacks, many Nicaraguans from Leon, the cradle of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, believe their aging former guerrilla leaders could soon return to power in elections that could also prove a diplomatic nightmare for Washington. "We need a change. It's been bad, bad, bad," said 60-year-old war Sandinista war veteran Daniel Sauro, referring to 16 years of pro-Washington governments that took power after Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega's electoral defeat in 1990. Sauro lives in a city where colonial churches and dilapidated houses are still splattered with aging bullet holes from 1970s street battles between...

CARACAS, Venezuela - U.S. missionaries accused by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of espionage have been forced from their remote outposts among jungle tribes by a government order, the final pair leaving Thursday after years of evangelical work. The New Tribes Mission flew those two out of the rain forest to regroup with other missionaries in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz. There they will decide what to do next: leave the country or continue with a legal battle seeking to overturn the government's order to expel them from indigenous areas by Sunday. Most of the group's missionaries are Americans. Since...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Thousands of supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez marched in Caracas on Saturday to support the leftist leader in his dispute with Mexico's president over U.S. free trade proposals. State workers, unionists and students, many wearing red T-shirts, waved flags and anti-U.S. placards as they marched through the capital accompanied by trucks blaring revolutionary songs, Venezuelan folk ballads and Mexican mariachi music. Venezuela and Mexico withdrew their ambassadors on Monday after Chavez called his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, a "lap dog" of U.S. imperialism for his close ties to Washington and told him, "Don't mess with...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua, March 20 - Raising tensions that have revived the politics and personalities of the cold war, the United States has suspended military assistance to Nicaragua because it has failed to move forward with the destruction of an arsenal of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles that the Bush administration considers a possible terrorist threat. American diplomats here said Friday that about $2.3 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Army had been suspended pending the destruction of the Soviet-made SA-7 missile systems. In Washington, a senior State Department official confirmed that "part of our security assistance is on hold" while an agreement...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP)-Miskito Indians leaders on Thursday asked government and human rights investigators to probe allegations that at least 150 of their people were killed under Nicaragua's Sandinista regime.The leaders said that the country's independent Permanent Human Rights Commission should investigate and the government prosecute those who carried out the killings and burned houses, destroyed crops and slaughtered livestock.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the July 18th, 2005, issue of National Review. Twenty years ago this summer, Washington’s hottest debate centered on the Contras’ war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — and how to keep the nations of Central America from falling into the hands of Marxist terrorists or right-wing death squads. It was the equivalent of today’s Iraq debate. The eventual victory of freedom in Nicaragua came at a cost of tens of thousands of lives — and it is now in jeopardy. The hard Left in Latin America has learned its lessons: It is no longer...

Facing down the Sandinistas By Enrique Bolanos On Tuesday, April 26, in Managua, Nicaragua, I approached, face-to-face, a crowd violently protesting a 3-cent increase in the public bus fare -- a rise triggered by the recent world oil price surge. There had already been four days of violent street demonstrations centered around three national universities and orchestrated by the Sandinistas. Private buses and government vehicles had been burned and several policemen injured, two of them seriously. Public transportation had been paralyzed for several days and smoke from protesters burning tires in the streets wafted above the city, and the long-gone...

FORT STEWART, Ga. - A soldier who said he refused to return to duty because he opposes the war in Iraq left his unit as its job became more dangerous, his commanding officer testified Thursday. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, an infantryman with the Florida National Guard, is charged with desertion after failing to return to his unit in Iraq after a two-week furlough in October. He said his experiences in Iraq turned him against the war, and he claims he deserted his unit partly to avoid orders to abuse Iraqi prisoners. Capt. A.J. Balbo, the lead prosecutor, said in his...

MANAGUA (AFP) - Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos put the army and police on high alert amid mounting protests against bus fare hikes, which have prompted calls for the president to resign. Blaming the unrest on opposition Sandinistas, Bolanos said in an address to the nations he wanted the armed forces to be ready "to contribute to the maintenance of tranquillity and order in the country. He also urged police to "take all necessary measures to ensure security and freedom of movement across national territory." The announcement came hours after demonstrators hurled rocks Bolanos, who had to be dragged back...

Code PinkoBy Jean PearceFrontPageMagazine.com | March 26, 2003 Like any other group, Communists come in a lot of shapes, sizes and colors. This time they’re wearing pink, they’re on the nightly news, and more than anything, they want the mothers and grandmothers of America to identify with them. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the leaders of the women’s anti-war group Code Pink got lost on their way to the carpool line. Since October, these hot pink-clad "marching moms" have been spinning the same tale to reporters from coast to coast, the one about how concern for their...